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I've created the tag because I think major political thinkers should have their own tags. Am I right?

Added: In the meantime, tags and have appeared. There's a question about Plato's ideas too, and perhaps tag should be created too. I think this needs to be decided now and if we accept such tags, perhaps we should standardize them. For example, "bin-laden" or "osama-bin-laden"?

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The full name should be used, for a number of reasons.

If someone tries to put part of the name (for example, Osama Bin Laden might be tagged Osama, as he is certainly the most known Osama, or Bin Laden, as he's the most known Bil Laden, even though both those names are fairly common in that area of the world) it gets the entire name as the suggested tag. Excellent.

Search indexing is a minor concern, but still relevant.

You avoid future name collisions. Who is the Kennedy tag for, or Clinton? What would we do if a guy named Steven Reagan wins elected office?

Now, if some other guy named "Bill Clinton" runs for office and wins, well we can re-address this then.

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I am of the opinion that it is a good idea to have tags for political thinkers. Personally, I use tags to browse questions. In the future, we may have a long series of questions on Marxism, but not every political thinker has a ideology named after him or her. Therefore, tags like , , , all belong on Politics SE.

Now what a political thinker is is indeed not easy to define.

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Think about tags as subscription options. They should not be a dictionary or replacement for our search engine. Also keep in mind tags get very messy very fast.

For these reasons I would restrict tags to concepts and leave person names out.

It is also difficult to say where to draw the line. Is Al Gore a political thinker? He invented the internet after all. :D

What we should do: edit posts to use the full names, so our search engine will show better results.

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    I agree with this. It should be sufficient to tag such questions with the state or party they are associated with, or the ideology which best represents them Dec 7, 2012 at 15:32
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    I disagree. I might want to subscribe to Karl Marx or maybe even Al Gore. Why not?
    – gerrit
    Dec 7, 2012 at 15:44

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